A Remarkable story of brain injury

Raphael Diluzio’s personal story is compelling on his own. He describes himself as a creative artist, entrepreneur and professor. His life took a wrong turn when, as he puts it, an 18-wheel truck carrying a full payload decided to “park” in the back of his Honda Fit. The accident resulted in a massive brain injury that caused amnesia and a loss of his ability to draw and speak. Undergoing two years of speech therapy to speak again gave him the time and motivation to reflect on creativity and the nature of creative process.

Diluzio came up with what he called the 7 stages of creativity based on his research and own experience as a recovering artist.

7 Stages Of Creativity

(1)State the question or the problem to solve. The idea is to carefully establish in your mind what requires your creativity. So, clearly frame the question/problem at the onset of the process. Note that it doesn’t have to be a grand problem like cold fusion. Things like what to give my spouse for her birthday, the next stage of a project at work, or what to write for your next blog post will do just fine.

(2)Research it. Humans are curious by creature; a baby will start exploring his world by sticking anything coming nearby in his mouth. This innate tendency to research a problem is even very satisfying to some of us. The gathering of data about a specific topic through reading books, exploring the Internet, and sharing your newly-found knowledge with others is the perfect way to saturate your mind with the elements related to the problem.

(3) But “Enough is enough!”. In other words, don’t get stuck in the research phase. This is what Diluzio calls the basta stage. Some might get lost in the satisfying nature of research phase, but at some point it’s time to stop inputting information and start reflecting.

(4)Gestation—You need to detach yourself from the problem and instead give it some space. It’s the stage of detachment. Let it stew. Keep the new information in the back of your mind while holding the problem gently in your mind. Look at the problem in a different way, with a different perspective: how would I solve the problem if I were a lobster or POTUS? Visualize the problem as something else. Apply divergent thinking. The use of metaphors or “psychological distance techniques“, as reported in this blog, can be particularly helpful. Don’t be afraid to think crazy ideas and more importantly don’t filter yourself. Diluzio suggests to operate with the fearlessness of imagination of an artist. Mesh the world of empiricism and intuition/imagination.

(5) Then if everything goes well, you should have a “eureka moment” that can comes as little flashes or major light-bulb illumination. What is very important at this stage is to write down ideas that comes with those eureka moments. So don’t waste those ideas: dictate them, draw them, capture them in Evernote (my personal favorite), write them down in your paper ideas journal, etc…

(6) Once you have the idea(s), you must “bring it into being“. A lot of people are afraid of failure and don’t give the idea a chance to become something concrete. We must operate without fear. DiLuzio says that he prefers “eloquent failures to boring success”. If you can concretize the idea yourself, get people around to help or describe it in minute details so others can realize it later. It’s important to bring the ideas out and share them otherwise the world or your company doesn’t move forward. Be the driver of innovation.

(7) Finally comes the stage of testing and criticizing by sharing those new ideas with the world. Invite criticism and feed it back into the creative process to refine the idea or branch out into better ideas.

Psychological Distance:

Brilliantly simple way to boost your creativity

Credit: http://bit.ly/Wj349m

In this fascinating Scientific American article, the authors (Oren Shapira and Nira Liberman) tell us that creativity is not bound by the sole innate characteristics of an individual and can in fact be changed based on situation and context.

Consider this experiment: 2 groups of participants from the Indiana University were asked to list as many different modes of transportation as possible. The first group was told that the task had been developed by Indiana University students studying in Greece and the second group was told instead that the task had been developed by Indiana University students studying in Indiana. The first group was able to generate more numerous and original modes of transportation that the second group.

How can such a minute detail have any significant influence on creativity?!

This phenomenon is referred as “Construal Level Theory (CLT) of Psychological Distance”, i.e. anything that we do not experience as occurring now and here. Attempting to take another person’s perspective or by thinking of a question as if it were unreal and unlikely, also fall in to that category of “psychological distant”.

According to CLT, psychological distance affects how we mentally represent things, where distant things are represented in an abstract way. Once classified as abstract (vs. concrete), it seems that the mind get an extra boost of creativity in solving or manipulating those abstract things.

Studies have also shown that projecting an event into the remote future can enhance creativity. In a series of experiments examining how temporal distance affects performance of insight and creativity tasks, participants were asked to imagine their lives a year later (distant future) or the next day (near future), and then to imagine working on a task on that day in the future. Once again, participants who imagined a distant future were more creative and insightful.

Finally, evidence shows that study participants were more successful at solving problems when they believe that they were unlikely to encounter the full task.

These findings have interesting practical implications. One can take simple steps to increase creativity by:

travelling (in person or just thinking about it) to faraway places,

envisioning distant future and

considering improbable alternatives to reality.

So, next time you are stuck on a problem that requires creativity, just picture yourself in a faraway place, in a far future, dreaming up of unlikely scenarios.